Octopus Pie

I believe that Octopus Pie is a relatively popular comic, so you’ve probably seen it already. However, I only got to reading it recently and found it rather entertaining. Plus, according to Alexis, only %0.00099 of the entire internet comes to OP on a regular basis so… okay, I don’t know what that means. Fuck Alexis, let’s go with “it’s indie”.

At any rate, the comic. Octopus Pie is a slice-of-life comic revolving around Eve Ning, a worker at an organic market in the city, and her two roommates with a particular fondness for hemp. Really, the basic premise is nothing too special, almost formulaic.

And that’s not a bad thing, despite how I’m making it sound. You see, S-o-L comics can have an interesting starting point, but it’s all moot if the adventures that the characters go on do not live up to the start. That’s the key part of making these comics good: interesting adventures. Take a look at the all-famous Questionable Content for examples. The basic premise is bland and boring, but it takes refuge in absurdity enough to avoid being too tedious.

I would say that OP is better than QC in that aspect. While the entire comic is not a romp through the fever-dreams of a borderline psychotic, it does take advantages with the power of plot with great frequency, much to its benefit.

One of the things that I enjoyed about OP is the fact that the plotlines were absurd, but strangely plausible. Social demigod shows up at your house and no one cares? It could happen. Underground coffee rings? Hell, I’ve heard worse. Bizzare practices at a Renaissance fair? It’s a Renaissance fair, enough said. And yet, these stories are strange enough to be interesting.

This is probably why I found OP so captivating. I was emotionally crushed when I hit the hard end of the archive, and that’s rarer than you might think. The stories flow well into each other, so it’s hard to break away until you’ve spent five hours going through 400 pages of material. It was good enough for me to overlook the depressing romantic parts, but hey, it provided a nice contrast to the humor of the rest of it. Besides, I hate romantic comedy, not romantic tragedy. I don’t care if that makes me a sadist, I’m calling it schadenfreude.

I’m also fond of the design of the comic. While the art style is arguable simple, the characters tend to show a lot of emotion for people with no eyelids or teeth. Could it be more detailed? Perhaps, but I haven’t arrived at the best part yet.

Detail and time are always at war. You can have something incredibly detailed and beautiful, a Dresden Codak or Lackadaisy Cats, but only update once a month. On the other hand, you could do things simply and post every day. Ms. Gran has found a nice middle ground, where the lines and shapes might be relatively simple, but the actual set pieces are very animated. There’s one page in the skating arc that has Eve performing a complex skating move; the style allows for the grace of the movement to show through. That’s just one example, of course, but I don’t have the space to go through them all.

There’s also a lot of text in the comic, but let’s be frank, if you don’t like reading with your comics then you can just go fuck yourself with a rusty spork. Hope you like tetanus!